There’s something to be said for a well-done, straightforward thriller – the kind that doesn’t treat its audience like Silly Putty to be shaped and reshaped on a twisty roller coaster.
Danny Boyle’s dreadful, masturbatory Trance contains a narrative puzzle so dense and disconnected that its logic doesn’t hold up to the most generous scrutiny. But, as simple marionettes in throng to the great puppetmaster pulling our strings, we’re just supposed to accept each new paradigm-shaking revelation with awe and reverence.
Compare Trance’s multiple, ludicrous plot shifts to The Silence, a muted German police procedural that is infinitely more thrilling than Boyle’s naughty, stylized mystery, even though (or even because) most viewers will predict and anticipate its reveal. Opening Friday exclusively at Lake Worth Playhouse — it deserves to be playing much wider — The Silence is about the connection between two crimes, separated by 23 years.
The film opens in 1986, where two floppy-haired, pedophilic compatriots, named Peer and Timo (Ulrich Thomsen and Wotan Wilke Möhring) silently inch their red Audi across a country road. They see a young girl on a bicycle and follow her into a vast, hopeless wheat field, where one of them rapes and murders the girl. They split up after the crime.
Twenty-three years later, another young girl vanishes from her bicycle in the same deadly wheat field, bearing all the hallmarks of a serial murder — or could it be coincidence? The detectives on the case have Achilles’ heels smartly written into their DNA: David (Sebastian Blomberg) is a shambolic, unstable and possibly autistic widower struggling to come to terms with his wife’s cancerous decline. And, unofficially, Krischan (Burghart Klaubner), the officer on the original case, is now a hot-headed civilian prone to rash decisions that put the investigation in jeopardy while simultaneously inching the department closer to the truth. Meanwhile, Timo, the silent observer to the original murder, is now a married father of two, and he watches the current case with nervous familiarity.
All of the characters are fascinating and unique, and unlike, say, Trance, we care about all of them. There’s also a pregnant police officer, the mother of the first murdered child, and the shell-shocked parents of the modern-day missing girl, all of whom mix and mingle in the movie’s intricate and sensitive tapestry of grief, trauma, investigation and flashback. For the latter, we see a bit more of Peer and Timo’s friendship in the ’80s, developed through their shared, unspoken desire to molest children. These unenviable parts are realistically and bravely acted, and these scenes are some of the most uncomfortable moments in recent cinema history — just as difficult to watch as they should be.
Both in story and style, The Silence conjures Bruno Dumont’s terrific Humanite (1999), but director Swiss director Baran bo Odar also channels the icy, dispassionate compositions of a Kubrick and the slow-boiling suspense of a Hitchcock — one scene, in particular, follows Hitch’s logic that the setup works much better when we know a bomb is ticking under the table than when we don’t. At any rate, this is an astonishingly accomplished first feature from Odar (if you don’t count a 60-minute film he released in 2006), stretching tethers of tension until they’re just about to break, and focusing on artfully symbolic digressions: a gerbil gnawing at the sides of its cage, a broken trampoline, a carnival oozing menace.
Ultimately, as with every cop movie in history, there has to be that one rogue officer who doesn’t accept the simple solution that eventually falls into the movie’s lap, and the way he pieces together the truth feels a little dubious given the credulity of his extrapolations. But even this, the movie’s lone cliché, is followed by scenes that break with convention, leaving the film on a simple but unsettling note that reverberates louder than any narrative dart a Boyle or a Shyamalan could throw at a cluttered target.
THE SILENCE. Director: Baran bo Odar; Cast: Sebastian Blomberg, Wotan Wilke Möhring, Ulrich Thomsen, Katrin Sab, Burghart Klaubner, Jule Bowe; in German with English subtitles; Distributor: Music Box; Not Rated; Opens: Friday at Lake Worth Playhouse